The Last Chairlift
John Irving
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
The Last Chairlift
John Irving
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Irving refuses to be embarrassed by anything, a quality that fits the tenor of his work.
An imposing brick of paper.
The contents of Chairlift may be so familiar...that at times it feels like a reboot of his 1978 classic, The World According to Garp.
It would hardly be an Irving novel if it weren’t stuffed — sometimes overstuffed.
Irving’s position has always been unequivocally clear.
An accessible introduction to the New England-born novelist whose work has always been stuffed with serious themes like religion, sex and politics, tempered by a fair dose of satire and absurdity, delivered by narrators in an endearing, matter-of-fact prose.
Not for those without readerly stamina.
... like a diner jukebox, it faithfully sticks with the author’s hits.
... it’s hard not to read The Last Chairlift, with its elegiac tone and sprawling time horizon, as a final, all-encompassing summary of Irving’s concerns and obsessions.
Irving’s majestic latest...is a multigenerational portrait as colorful and varied as it is complex and quirky as it echoes and pays homage to the author’s own rich literary history.
For fans who’ve followed him over the course of a career spanning more than half a century, The Last Chairlift will feel like settling into a well-worn pair of slippers. They’ll have plenty of time to savor that comfortable sensation.
... punctuated by rather spectacular deaths -- so many of them, in fact, that it rather undermines their effectiveness. There are several two-for-one shared deaths, there are suicides and murder, and also the simply spectacular: as with much in this book, it's all a bit much, and mostly to too little effect.
John Irving’s 15th novel is 11 shy of 900 pages long. And boy, did I feel every one of those pages.
The thing is, John Irving is a genius –a comic, warm, brilliant genius. The fact that this book is terrible is simply something we must all just get over. Everyone has forgotten to press the lock button on an Intercity train and had the door opened on them. Let’s not do that to a brilliant titan of American literature, someone who on his best days touches Dickens.
Overblown and underplotted.
Sprawling.